First published in Bangalore Mirror
After the World Cup, a bite of Italian could mean a lot of things, but in HSR Layout, there aren’t really a lot many options. That probably explains the crowd on a Saturday night at Napoli Bistro. ( Having said that, HSR continues to surprise me each time with its growth spurts!) Street parking and a flight of stairs take you to a well-lit floor with views to the busy 27th Main road. (map) The faux brick wall, the framed art and the functional, elegant furniture all add a semblance of character to the place. We got there just in time before the place filled up. The menu is all Italian and seemingly extensive.
There is no dearth of starter options – soup, appetisers and a host of salads – though there is a clear skew towards vegetarian. On a chilly Bangalore night, a soup is a great way to begin a meal, and that’s exactly what we did. The description doesn’t offer a lot of explanation and simply states ‘Non Veg’. The risk turned out to be worth it and we got a delicious, creamy yellow soup (pumpkin was the guess, but turned out to be carrot) with chicken sausage slices. The Napoli Pesto was a tasty dish too – toasted bread with a tasteful signature pesto. The Chicken Quesadilla – standard tortillas stuffed with diced chicken – wasn’t really the best we have had. Quite savourless and a bit too greasy.
Napoli is the birthplace of modern pizza and that’s probably what gives this section two whole pages in the restaurant’s menu. The Spaghetti Pizza wasn’t something we’d find on a standard menu, so we began there. A thin crust pizza with loads of cheese and topped with spaghetti, it was all subtle flavours and quite tasty. The Napoli Meaty Feast seemed like a good way to balance the vegetarian domination thus far. The pizza did have the potential – chicken sausage, pepperoni, and chicken cubes – but despite the star presence, the pizza was only ordinary. We were surprised by the appearance of the Mushroom & Meatballs crepes, it looked more like a cannelloni actually. It came with what was advertised as a pink sauce, but was closer to yellow. There was no taking away from its awesomeness though, and this was the best dish we had. The Chicken Crème was our first choice of pasta. The shell pasta was well cooked and the creamy sauce with chicken chunks and a faint trace of egg yolk was reasonably tasty, if not great. The Limone Mintova sounded quite interesting and we asked for it – with fettuccine. The sauce clearly had a mint flavour and the very mild lemon touch gave it a nice tang pop. The pasta we got was definitely not fettuccine though! There is a kids pasta menu as well, and that offered some explanation to the unusually large number of kids around!
There are exactly four options in desserts, and we chose the clichéd (by name) Death By Chocolate and the Choco Bomb. There’s no way to sugar coat this, neither of them were really great. The former was a let down on two counts – the excessive sweetness and the lazy Hershey job that accompanied it. The latter was not better either, and was in essence the standard stuff one finds in a dozen other stores.
A meal for two would cost around Rs.1000 (Inclusive of taxes and service charge) – a non veg starter, a non veg pizza and pasta and a dessert. While there are a few restaurants that also serve Italian in this part of town, there are probably none that specialise in the cuisine. That does offer a good potential for Napoli Bistro, but they need to polish up their act a bit in terms of the menu and the quality of the food because these are definitely things that could come back to bite them later!
Napoli Bistro, 646, 12th Cross, 27th Main, HSR Layout Sector 1, Ph: 080 22580999